The craftsmanship in these two machines is remarkable. There’s something to be said for this kind of organized chaos.
Particularly fun is his binary adding machine, which can be found along with several other facinating contraptions at www.woodgears.ca
These talks, found on the marvelous ted.com, discuss how choice can affect our happiness. While Gladwell shows how a variety of options can allow people to be most satisfied by their choice, Barry Schwartz proposes that this variety has in fact left us paralyzed, and ultimately unsatisfied.
It is interesting how we develop our tastes, and sometimes variety allows us to fine tune our preferences, yet the same overwhelming variety may confuse us, and make choice difficult. It’s been observed that people will often forgo the choice altogether, especially when making frivolous purchases. It’s tough to find that balance, and I’m sure that certain products lend better to variety than others. I do believe that a small set of very specialized, distinct choices, can be very satisfying. People will often find what they like most if they have the opportunity to try everything.
This is one of the tenets of behavoural psychology. If you ignore all elements of cognition, and only look to the relationships between stimulus and response, you can avoid trying to explain all the complex stuff that goes on in your head. And for a long time this was extremely successful. We were able to gleam a whole field of information about how animals might learn to respond to certain situations. But when you start to get into murky concepts like categorization, or identifying attributes, this get’s really hard.
Take, for example, salty and sweet. Two tastes you would assume are quite easy to discriminate. It’s actually quite hard, and I struggled for a long time with one boy trying to get him to tell the difference. You can’t say things like, “You have sweet things for desert,” because sometimes you might have potato chips after dinner. Is this really desert? Or would you consider it an after dinner snack? Well, even that discrimination could be a nightmare to teach to someone who can’t easily tell the difference to begin with.
So I stopped, and I decided to start with two given axioms. Crackers are salty. Chocolate is sweet. I told him, “Don’t worry about why this is true, just assume it and memorize it.” Then I asked him, is chocolate cake like chocolate, or like crackers? It’s like chocolate, and chocolate is sweet, so chocolate cake is sweet. How about potato chips, are they like chocolate or crackers? Well, potato chips are like crackers, so potato chips are salty. Now he had some conjectures to work with. French fries are like potato chips, it’s salty. Ice cream goes with cake, it’s sweet.
Suddenly I took the guess work out of it. The boy didn’t have to memorize large sets of information, and he went from getting 50% of the answers right to about 90%, in a matter of minutes. It’s not perfect, you can always get some strange associations. Sometimes, pretzels are covered in chocolate. But for those special cases, if that’s all you have to worry about, you can memorize it brute force. If you have to learn a lot of discrete information at once, you’re going to start mixing up what goes where. Anyone who’s tried to cram for a test has encountered this. But if you can use an analogy or a metaphor which accounts for the majority of cases, you can take out the guess work. Of course, the hardest part is finding that analogy to begin with.
Jenova Chen is one of the first to pioneer Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow constraints into a game. He released flOw as a flash game, which went on to become the very successful PS3 title of the same name.
I think he’s really run with the formula with this next title Active Quiz for Math.
Something that really stuck with me when I read Jenova’s thesis was the notion of controlling difficulty through the core mechanics of a game.
“[...]the game needs to offer a pool with a wide spectrum of activities and difficulties for different types of players to swim inside. Based on players’ tastes, each individual will choose different choices and work at a different pace to navigate through the game.”*
You can see this in Active Quiz for Math. As the quiz progresses, you can quickly scan your choices for the math problems you think you could most quickly solve. I think this model could work extremely well with tasks which require snap judgments, especially where a time constraint is involved. The faster you can quickly determine the path of least resistance, without consciously thinking it through, the more quickly you can move from one task to the next. Ultimately, in flow, this is what you want to achieve: a merging of action and awareness, where you no longer think to choose, but simply act.
A couple years ago, a friend of mine, who is studying Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, introduced me to some ideas which completely changed the way I looked at the world and myself. Among those ideas was Csikszentmihalyi’s work in Positive Psychology. This lecture was another.
As an English student, this bridge between literature and psychology is extremely compelling for me. It runs about an hour, but I highly recommend it to anyone with the time who has an interest in the value of narrative in everyday life.
If you’ve seen Beowulf:The Movie or Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within, the ‘Uncanny Valley’ needs no introduction. Proposed by Masahiro Mori some thirty years ago, the valley is what happens when you encounter something closely resembling a human but it misses the mark in such a way that it triggers repulsion.
I remember how excited people were about the Final Fantasy movie. Everything seemed so lifelike, some even speculated that real life actors may soon be out of a job. (By the way, when people start making apocalyptic comments like that, I always get sceptical). As people sat through the film, this annoyance of the just-less-than-real CG caused a reversal. People stopped finding the movie awe-inspiring, and just started to find it repulsive. The acting and the writing were not bad, but the emotional content of the movie really required you to care deeply about the characters. This is much harder when you’re constantly comparing what you see to the real thing. People are very good at facial recogniton, and spend most of their days practicing it, so when you come across something trying to trick you, you can’t suspend disbelief. And if you think you’re looking at corpse, even subconsciously, what else should you be feeling but repulsion?
Alan Turing came up with a test to define if a computer had finally achieved human-like intelligence. You sit with, say, a text messaging device, and you can comunicate with two contacts: a person and a computer, but you are not told which contact is the machine. If, over the course of your conversation with the two, you cannot tell which is the real person, and which is the machine, that machine can be justifiably deemed intelligent. I think something like this might be the only way to get past the Uncanny Valley.
If, while watching a movie, you can’t tell which characters are human, and which are CG, the game and film industries will have finally clawed its way out of the valley. Until then, however, I don’t think there are any simple technical tricks which will be able to prevent this very natural response to facsimile faces.
The presentation in this game is remarkable. The interface applies the mouse in a completely unique way and the graphics are unparalleled in today’s flash games. Add to that an amazing soundtrack by Tin Hat Trio. Keep an eye out for more work from these designers.
Florian Himsl
Edmund McMillen (who, by the way, created Gish) .
I don’t know where I got the term. It might have been from Gödel, Escher, Bach. At the very least, I know what it means - I’ve been using the concept for a while to help understand analogies.
Look at the image I drew above. It has two distinct spacial interpretations. You’ve probably seen something like this before in an Escher drawing. Somehow, you interpret the image one way until *flip* the image reverses itself and you see it another way. You can’t interpret it both ways at once.
However, you might try showing an Escher drawing to a young child, and they won’t get that same flipping. Somehow that meaningful change doesn’t happen automatically. So are they only seeing their first interpretation and never flipping to another one? It seems to effortless for us, until you encounter something you haven’t learned to flip.
Try looking at this ballerina. Which way is it she turning, clockwise or counter-clockwise? Now: can you get her to turn the other way? It’s not easy for everyone.
This is one of those games you play, wishing you came up with the idea yourself. Yoshio Ishii has a truly innovative game here. Cursor* 10 cleverly uses a mechanism which records your interactions, then echoes it back to you. Your task is to collaborate with those echoes to solve puzzles. I think there is a lot that could be done with this premise.
The solution to insight puzzles often relies on restructuring. This usually means that the problem-solver has made a mistake somewhere in their interpretation of the problem, and before they can make a solution assumptions need to be changed. For example, take this insight puzzle:
A man has married over forty people in his life. He has never been divorced and he is not a polygamist. How can this be?
Like most people, I would get tripped-up by the word ‘married.’ Marriage the most important concept in the puzzle, and it helps define all the constraints: getting married more than once implies divorce or polygamy. Of course, a simple solution is to say, ‘He murdered all his wives.’ Technically, this solves the problem, but nobody would admit that the solution took any insight. The real solution is that the man is a priest, and by ‘married over forty people’ we mean he oversaw the ceremonies.
What characterizes this difference between the cop-out answer (murder) and the valid answer? Is it the change in meaning for the word ‘married’ which causes that ‘a-ha’ feeling?
